Study finds ad effectiveness remains high across all VOD ad loads

Advertising within a VOD environment has a positive impact on the level of engagement with consumers, offering brand marketers with specific advantages, found a study released last month by the Advanced Advertising Media Project (AAMP).

The Phase II study, which sought to measure the impact of advertising within free VOD programming, looked at the viewing behavior of more than 1000 consumers. The study was conducted with television programming from 11 AAMP member broadcast and cable networks and branded messaging from 10 national advertisers across six categories.

According to Bill Koenigsberg, president, CEO and founder of Horizon Media, the most important finding of the study for the media industry is “consumers will watch, recall and respond even to heavy loads of ads within VOD programming.”

Four basic themes emerged from the study:Advertisements within a VOD context statistically have the same impact, no matter what the size of the ad load;Because consumers view VOD as television, they accept advertising on VOD as a logical part of the on-demand experience;On-demand television has a positive effect on consumers’ sense of control over content and advertising; andVOD provides opportunities for increased ad durations that can foster greater storytelling and information sharing by advertisers.

Conducted by Ipsos OTX, Phase II of the AAMP study tested three different VOD ad loads within 19 primetime TV shows or segments of 30 minutes each. The test formats included: a “light” load with three minutes of inventory; a “moderate” load of five and one-half minutes of advertising; and a “heavy” load, which contained eight minutes of advertising. In addition, the study tested a second version of the “Light” load that included a 90-second ad unit. All groups were benchmarked against the standard eight-minute linear ad load.

Participants watched comedy, drama and reality programming that contained ads from various categories. The tests were conducted in custom-built media labs in New York and Los Angeles, and used a sophisticated set-top box VOD interface that was custom-built by NDS. Consumers used a specially created mobile handset app to record their experiences while viewing. In-depth follow-up interviews also were conducted with 30 participants.